From The New York Times
by Alex Vadukul
Some empires are managed from a distance: in corner offices, from cellphones on beaches, under palm fronds while being fanned by servants.
Hesham Hegazy, the general manager of the Midtown street-food empire the Halal Guys, prefers sitting by a window at a Starbucks at West 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue, where night after night he can observe his street-cart workers as they serve platter after platter of chicken and rice for ever-replenishing lines of customers.
One recent evening, Mr. Hegazy, 54, wearing a traditional kufi, sat with a coffee at one of his regular tables, with two Halal Guys carts within sight across the way. He will sometimes sit there late into the night. “To watch the guys,” he said, gesturing to the scene.
Mr. Hegazy manages one of the longest-running and best-known food-cart businesses in New York City with a style best described as old-fashioned. He receives email but almost never responds to it, preferring to conduct business over the phone or in person at the coffee shop.
To proudly illustrate a story about the Halal Guys being the first halal cart to secure a trademark, he made a fast phone call in Arabic; moments later, a boyish-looking young man appeared at the table with a takeout bag bearing the logo as proof.
Before Mr. Hegazy arrives in the evenings, cart workers have been known to set out cones to secure him a parking spot on Sixth Avenue. The Halal Guys know how to work the street.
But things are about to change for the Guys. More than a decade after three Egyptian men switched from selling hot dogs from their Midtown cart to serving halal food to Muslim cabdrivers, the Halal Guys are about to become a fast-food chain. The company — founded by Mohamed Abouelenein, Ahmed Elsaka and Abdelbaset Elsayed — signed a deal with Fransmart, the restaurant franchise consulting firm that took Five Guys Burgers and Fries from four locations in Northern Virginia and helped turn it into a chain with more than 1,200 stores and more than $1 billion in sales last year. Qdoba, a Mexican food chain, is Fransmart’s other success story.
